The original Fairy tale from which the little mermaid was adapted was by Hans Christian Andersen. In that story the goal and story were a little bit more abstract and complicated and it did not have a happy ending as did the Disney telling. Basically, mermaids have no soul and the little mermaid wanted a soul but had to marry the prince to get it. Without a soul, which only humans have she would dissolve back into the sea upon death (thereby emphasizing the fact that men have souls which are valuable and need to be “saved”). You can find more on the original story at https://collider.com/the-little-mermaid-disney-hans-christian-andersen-story-differences/ .
The original cartoon was more fun and more musical, in my opinion. Though there was not a lot of “woke” ideology similar to recent Disney films, the film may have merited a remake in the Disney corporation’s mind because every cartoon character in the original was Caucasian so appeared to be on a seaport that was populated by European types. The new live action version appeared to be shot at a Caribbean/Jamaican island setting where Ariel was black and the prince was Caucasian being an adoptee of a black queen (I guess trying to get the whole inter racial marriage thing and strong female leadership models). Ursula the evil sea witch was played by Jenny McCarthy, a Caucasian woman. Also, in the original, as mentioned before all the sea kings daughters were Caucasian where as in the new live action movie, his daughters represented several different races.
The above were the salute to the wake crowd and nothing about gender ideology that I could see was included. Other than that, and a few other small unassuming changes the movie was very similar to the original. The acting was decent as was the singing. The things that merited the PG-13 ratings was the sea king destroying Ariel’s collection of human stuff, Ursula growing angry and gigantic trying to kill Arial and Eric and the bloodthirsty chef attempting to kill Sebastian to make a seafood dinner which were all in the animated original.
Traditional Thomistic Catholic 